1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data relay device, information terminal equipment, a computer-readable recording medium storing a data relay program, and a computer-readable recording medium storing an information browsing program, and more particularly to a data relay device storing relayed data as history information, information terminal equipment for gaining access to history information of such a data relay device, a computer-readable recording medium storing a data relay program for storing relayed data as history information, and a computer-readable recording medium storing an information browsing program for gaining access to a data relay device storing history information.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Recently, the exchange of information by use of WWW (World Wide Web) on the Internet is increasing. Use of WWW provides users with the ability to gain easy access to information in the world.
A user browses page data on WWW servers using client software (hereinafter, simply referred to as a client) called a browser. To gain access to information on WWW, an identifier called URL (Uniform Resource Locator) indicating a data position is inputted to the browser. A request to the URL is sent from the browser to the WWW server and data corresponding to the URL is returned. The data is displayed on the browser and the user can browse the data.
Although users browse data on WWW in this way, since information on WWW is always changing, the same contents cannot always be browsed by the same URL. Data contents are updated several times a day in the home pages of most newspaper publishing companies, for example. Accordingly, to rebrowse browsed data later requires that users store the data by some method. For example, if information about desirable data is stored in a computer in which a client is executed, even if the contents of the data within a WWW server have been updated, the pre-update data would be able to be browsed.
However, if data browsed previously is stored in individual computers in which clients are executed, the data cannot be accessed from a plurality of clients. If data browsed previously is stored as history information which can be accessed from a plurality of computers, users are very conveniently accessible to the history information even if the computers they use change. Accordingly, it is conceivable that data relayed is automatically stored as history information in a device (data relay device) for relaying data such as a proxy server so that the history information can be accessed from computers on the network.
However, a WWW page often contains images, which each are specified by a URL different from that of the page. Accordingly, the images are stored in a data relay device as different history information. In the case of rebrowsing such a page consisting of a plurality of pieces of data, a previous browsing state cannot be correctly reproduced without accessing correct pairs of basic data and image data contained in the basic data.